Full Fathom Five
by Anise
Summary: The war drags on and on, and Ginny and Draco are trapped in a never-ending cycle of passion, betrayal, revenge, and reunion on opposite sides of the battle… until a terrifying chance comes along to change it all.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: This fic was written for the 2010 fic exchange, and then it just kind of... never got published on the site. Also, this is the longer version, so even for those who might remember it from the exchange, it has a lot of new material. Now that DDD is done, I'm cleaning up some loose ends. I really, REALLY like this fic, and I hope that y'all do too. :)

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Old man, you surface seldom.  
Then you come in with the tide's coming  
When seas wash cold, foam-

Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung,  
A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves  
Crest and trough. Miles long.

- Sylvia Plath, _Full Fathom Five_

The first time was the skirmish in the catacombs underneath the abandoned Ministry five months before, about a month after Midwinter, when Ginny had guessed correctly that Death Eaters would try to steal crucial maps from the underground library. Her information had led the Order forces to intercept the attempt, and even though Ron had blustered that it was too dangerous, and Hestia Jones had agreed that she was just too valuable to them all to put at risk, she had gone along on the raid. She'd argued that only she really knew the area well, and it was true, but that wasn't why she went along.

She'd seen the tall, black-cloaked figure at the very end of the row of shelves, and she'd caught the flash of silvery hair in the dim light. And she hadn't told any of the Order members that he was there. Someone else certainly would have done, she knew. Their eyes had met. She was sure of it, or at least she had been at the time. And he hadn't told any of the Death Eaters that she was there, either. They had let each other go.

The second time was the raid on the ruins of Hogwarts three months before, around Imbeholc, where the remnants of the Order had set up temporary headquarters. What the Death Eaters didn't know, however, was that the other side had led them into a trap, planned and set up primarily by Ginny Weasley. The pincers had closed on them, and in the fighting, a tall, fair-haired figure had fallen, apart from the rest. The heart that Ginny thought she didn't have anymore had plummeted through her chest as she ran to where he lay on the floor of a deserted Charms classroom. When she twitched his cloak aside and found that he was Zacharias Smith, who'd gone over to the Death Eaters long ago, she had sunk back on her heels, dizzy with relief.

It took her several minutes to realize who was standing above her, his silvery hair shining in the moonlight. Once again, their eyes had met. Both of their wands were drawn. She could have captured him, or at least tried to do so; he could have done the same to her. Both of them put their wands away, very slowly. He held out his hand to her, and she took it, and for the first time in over two years, the first time since the end of the war, the war that neither side had won in the end, he touched her. It could not have hurt her more if he had stabbed her to the heart. She heard his quick indrawn breath of pain, and she wondered what it had done to him. Then both of them walked away.

The third time was during the intense fighting for Hogsmeade, only one week before, just before the spring festival, not that anyone celebrated that anymore. They were all darting from house to house, Order members and Death Eaters alike, shooting the increasingly ineffective spells at each other in a nightmare of confusion and yelling and smoke and darkness. Ginny had been running through what remained of the Three Broomsticks, separated from everyone else, searching desperately for Hermione and Luna, when she came face to face with him. She ran into him so hard that all the breath was knocked out of her, and she reeled back against the bar; she could see her white, terrified face reflected in the jagged pieces of broken mirror behind it. His face was as pale as death, rising from a cloak black as a grave. For a crazy instant all she could think was that he was still as beautiful as he'd been when he'd come to her so late on the night of the last battle of Hogwarts, after they were all so sure that the war was really over. And they'd all been so very, very wrong. A few weeks later, Narcissa Malfoy had died.

His wand was drawn; hers was still tucked into her trousers. He had her, she thought almost calmly. He'd be a fool not to capture her now. She had been the brains behind the Order for a long time. Without her cunning and her plans, they might already have been defeated. Would he kill her? She'd turned the idea over in her mind, coldly. All of her emotions seemed frozen into ice at the moment. _He certainly can't haul me before Voldemort for a spot of Cruciatus,_ she thought. _Seeing as the Dark Lord's been dead for two years, although that didn't exactly fix everything, did it? Or at least everyone else is convinced that he's dead. Why am I the only one who can't quite believe it? And where's Harry, that's the question nobody can answer, of course. Maybe he's set up light housekeeping with the Dark Lord, somewhere…_ A mad impulse to giggle seized her.

But he wouldn't have wanted to see Voldemort torture her, anyway, she'd thought. No. That wouldn't have pleased him much. Maybe he'd rather torture her himself. _You already have,_ she thought, looking at his painfully beautiful face. _I've paid and paid for everything I've ever been to you. Oh, you'll never know how high the price has been._ No, if he could have asked Voldemort for anything, thought Ginny, he would have asked his Dark Lord if he could keep her for himself as a reward, because ever since he had made his choice to remain with the Death Eaters, and then, finally, to _lead_ the Death Eaters, after one war had ended and another had begun, he could never, ever have her in any other way. But now that there was no Voldemort anymore, he could choose to keep her without asking anyone's permission.

_That would be torture enough,_ thought Ginny. It would be exquisite pleasure and unbearable pain, intermingled every moment of every day and every night until she would no longer be able to tell the difference, and she wondered if she would finally go mad.

And if he put out his hand to take her, Ginny knew that she would not even try to fight him.

But he didn't put out his hand. He turned away, and he left her. A group of Order members burst in then, led by Anthony Goldstein. Ginny didn't tell them that he'd been there, even though they probably could have caught him.

It wasn't until all the confusion was over that everyone realized Ron was missing.

"He was right next to me," Hermione keeps repeating over and over during the Order meeting afterwards. "Honestly, Ginny, I did my best to keep hold of him, I'd put every Tracking spell on him, of course you know that none of them works terribly well anymore but still I was up until midnight every night last week trying to make them more effective and I _thought_ I'd achieved at least thirty-seven percent more efficiency on some of them and—"

She goes on and on until it is all that Ginny can do not to hit her. Not that what anyone else has said is much more useful. Nobody even seems to know exactly _when_ Ron disappeared, much less who had taken him. The only thing anyone can say is that he must have vanished after the last time Draco Malfoy was seen, but nobody seems to know when that was.

_I do,_ thinks Ginny. _I do._

Chances. All those chances to capture him that she let slip through her fingers, and she knows it now; chances where he had let her slip through his. When Ginny thinks about it, there might very well have been other chances too, other occasions, but they were always too subtle to be sure of. These last three chances were not subtle. They were close enough to touch each other, and sometimes they did touch, close enough to look into each others' eyes, and every time, they had looked. She always knew that their past together has made her perilously weak, when it comes to him; she always had times when she thought about warning the Order not to trust her so very much because of this. But she didn't want them to know about her past with him. She is, has been, trustworthy in everything else. But when it comes to Draco Malfoy, she is a broken reed, and now it is too late.

_But it can't be too late,_ she tells herself fiercely, sitting at the table in the basement of their meeting room in the back alley. _I won't let it be too late._ She knows that she only has one more chance now.

"There's only one way to even have any hope of finding Ron, because you know that the Death Eaters are probably holding him there anyway, even though he doesn't show up on a Tracking spell," she says mechanically. "We've got to go ahead with the plan. _I've_ got to go ahead with it."

"Do you think you'll be able to manage it now?" Luna asks thoughtfully, almost as if her question holds no more than simple curiousity.

"I have to," says Ginny grimly. "If we wait, it won't work, you know that. And anyway, it's not as if I need to be in the right frame of mind to do magic, is it?"

An awkward sort of silence falls over the room. Ever since Harry Potter disappeared only a few weeks after the supposed end of the war, the magic of the wizarding world has been failing and falling away, spells losing their power, charms breaking down, curses weakening. But for this plan, Ginny doesn't need magic.

"I suppose not," says Luna.

"We can't afford any delay," says Ginny. "I'll go tomorrow. We know that Draco Malfoy's off getting reinforcements until after May Day, so I can't wait—it's got to be before he comes back- " Her voice catches. She wonders if Luna is looking at her strangely. Luna has always seen too much and understood more than she should, and the ability goes deeper than magic.

If Ginny had to rely on magic to get into Malfoy Manor, she doubts that she could succeed at this task, no matter what. The spells protecting it have always been too formidable for that. But she knows another way, and she's always been able to deflect questions from Order members about exactly how she learned it (_although that's never really put Luna off the scent very well, has it,_ she thinks uncomfortably.)

"You'll never get me in here in a million years," she'd said to Draco, laughing. It was May Day, a school holiday, and everyone else was much too busy dancing round the maypole and picnicking to notice that they'd both left the grounds. Later on in the evening, of course, they both knew that there would be a good deal of something else going on among the older students, which would make it even less likely that they'd be missed. "What do you want to bet the wards around it are probably specifically set to keep Weasleys out?" she asked as he tried to sneak her through the back kitchen gardens.

"I wouldn't bet much," he said, "because you're right. They have been since the Norman Invasion, you know. But I'm not going to let anything keep this Weasley out." Then he had turned and kissed her in the wildflowers until warmth spread all through her, and even though he looked tired and strained and afraid, as he did all through that year, he was the most beautiful boy she had ever seen, and even though mysteries haunted him, she didn't care, and in that moment he was her sweet secret and she was his and nothing else mattered in the world. He took her in through the hidden back entrance that led through the sunporch, down a winding little hall, past a warren of small spare bedrooms on the back ground floor of the manor, and up a winding flight of stairs to his own private rooms.

"Nobody will ever find us here," he said. "I've got my rooms protected by spells that even the Dark Lord himself can't break. You're safe here, Ginny, and so am I."

They were cold and formal as a museum, filled with priceless white and gold French furniture, and so perfect that she was almost frightened to touch anything. She sat perched on the edge of a chair for a long time, but Draco finally coaxed her onto his enormous walnut four-poster bed and drew its sumptuous curtains so that all she saw was the rose garden in full bloom, outside his bay window. Then they sat up and talked, and somehow she found her way into his arms, and they ended up snogging passionately all afternoon long. As the sun began to go down over the horizon, he slipped his hands under her cloak and touched her breasts under her blouse, tentatively. She had moaned and arched her back and pushed her chest forward, into his, until she startled herself with her own desire. But when he started to lower her down to the mattress and his long, elegant fingers began unfastening her buttons, and his silvery eyes darkened at the sight of the edge of her black lace bra, she shook her head. "We can't," she'd said, even though it felt like she'd never wanted anything so much as to let him continue. He sighed, and took her back to Hogwarts.

That was the first time he had taken her to Malfoy Manor.

Ginny doesn't trust herself to Apparate onto the grounds, so she takes the train into Wiltshire and then hires a car into the nearest village. She parks at Stonehenge, looks round quickly for tourists, and quickly says the spell that will reveal the Malfoy property behind anything that is visible to Muggles, praying that everything works. It really should, though, she thinks. This is the oldest sort of primal earth magic, and it doesn't rely on more recent wizarding knowledge.

The fields and roads shimmer, and then resolve into the outer boundaries of the Malfoy lands. Ginny breathes a sigh of relief and begins walking. _Apparition would be better, though. Apparition wouldn't give me time to think. Oh, gods, I don't want to think!_ She tries to simply run over the plan in her head again. The Order has been working this out for so very long, after all; she needs to get it right in every detail.

Only a few months after the end of the war, right in the middle of all the rejoicing, Harry had disappeared. Nobody knew where Harry was, of course, but the most logical idea was that the remnant of the Death Eaters had kidnapped him. This would fit in with the way that all wizarding magic had been weakened so much. Ginny immediately was thrust into the utterly unsought position of a sort of unofficial Harry Potter-widow, and as such, was treated with deference. Without a doubt, their dating partnership had been _quite_ official in the weeks after the war. They'd been photographed together at dances and dinners and charity events, parades in Harry's honor, statue unveilings, building dedications, and the gods only knew what else, because Ginny certainly couldn't remember almost any of it. The days had passed in a dizzying whirl, and the nights… well, she'd rather not remember the nights at all.

But less than a week later, nobody needed to remember anything. The Death Eaters rose from ashes like a dark phoenix, striking with terrible force at the very heart of the wizarding world. They destroyed the Ministry and Hogwarts on the same day, and they used Muggle weapons to do it. Lucius Malfoy was their new leader, Narcissa was already dead, of course (and Ginny tried not to think too much about that,) and nobody knew the extent of Draco's involvement for a long time. Nobody could say exactly how Ginny emerged into such a prominent position in the resurgence of the Order when she was barely seventeen years old, but it probably had a great deal to do with the utter chaos, and the fact that without Harry, she seemed to be the next best thing. Then everyone found that she seemed to know what the Death Eaters were going to do before they did it themselves, and she quietly slipped into her position as the brains behind the resistance.

But then after Draco Malfoy's father had died in a raid six months earlier, he had taken over the Death Eaters completely, and she began seeing him on raids for the first time in two years, and it seemed that one thing led to another and snowballed. And finally she had ended up here, with her brother gone and her heart aching desperately, and their long-held plan all in her hands, the hands that she could feel trembling, filled with weakness over the silvery-haired young man in the house she was approaching now.

The hidden entrance isn't easy to find; the gardens have grown up round the entire wall where she thinks it is, and after all, she's only seen it twice, but Ginny does eventually find the small, weatherbeaten door under a tangle of vines. She picks the lock with two hairpins twisted together. If there were any spells protecting it, they've broken down now. The door swings open on rusty hinges with a horribly loud squeak, and she winces, wishing she'd thought to bring a can of oil. Her breath catches.

The back corridors and the tiny spare rooms are elegant, clean, perfectly preserved, and in these days, when nearly everything from the old days and old world seems to lie in ruins, this seems bizarre at the very least. But it makes sense, Ginny tells herself. It really only means that what they figured out in Order meetings when they came up with this plan is correct. Malfoy Manor is, in fact, the headquarters for the new Death Eaters; it doesn't make sense for those to be anywhere else. So Hermione must be right about Harry, too.

"Harry is there," she'd said flatly in that first planning meeting six months before, the one that had led to all the others. "The Finding spell proves it. No, I don't know why his Trace should be so very strong when no other spells are working these days, but the results are conclusive. He's somewhere in Malfoy Manor. And honestly, the only idea that makes any sense anyway is that the Death Eaters have been holding him at the Manor all along. My theory is that they're somehow controlling his power, or lessening it; no, I don't know how, but it would explain the way that all the magic has been steadily weakening ever since he disappeared. Don't you agree, Ron?"

And Ron would always nod, but as the meetings went on, he seemed to have less and less to actually _say_ to Hermione's theories, thinks Ginny as she steals down the corridor, moving as quietly as she can. Something happened to the shining image of the Golden Trio, although when or how, she didn't know. But she has her ideas as to why, and she sometimes thinks that Ron does, too.

She reaches the little winding staircase without anyone stopping her or catching her, and she glances up the dark little stairs. If she goes up three flights, she knows that she will come out into Draco's bedroom. She closes her eyes, and briefly, she sees it again; the room where she had gone twice with Draco, and the big wooden four-poster bed where she had lain down twice with Draco, the one where she and Draco Malfoy had once… had once…

Ginny hurries down the staircase so fast that she almost twists an ankle.

Over an hour and a half later, she sits on the same landing, wiping cobwebs off her forehead. Harry isn't anywhere in the dungeons. But that was where he was _supposed_ to be! The entire plan depended on her being able to go down there and quickly get him out. They didn't know exactly where he was in the Manor, only that he was there, but that was the only place where he could have been kept secured for two entire years. Anywhere else would simply have been too risky from the Death Eaters' point of view, because the Dementors had all disappeared and Azkaban couldn't be guarded or defended anymore. Could everybody in the Order have been wrong? Maybe Harry wasn't being kept there at all. But Hermione had been so _sure_, and the results of that Tracking spell had been so clear and strong…

A scampering noise on the stairs makes her jump a foot in the air, but it's only a cat chasing a mouse round the corner. She puts a hand to her chest and hears the thump-thump of her heart. It's turned out to be nothing _this_ time, but the very next noise she hears could be anything at all. House-elf spies, for instance, or one of the other Death Eaters left behind to guard the Manor. _Or Draco himself,_ something traitorous within whispered to her. No. That was impossible. He was away until after May Day; she'd specifically gathered that intelligence, or she'd never have even thought of coming here now. And no matter what it did to her, she _had_ to come here now. It's the only way to save Ron. And to find Harry, of course, she has to remind herself, because that was the original plan, of course, except that she can't seem to find him.

Is there anywhere else that either of them could possibly _be?_ She wonders. It would have to be a space capable of being magically shielded so strongly that the Order couldn't find him; even if that doesn't make much difference now, when all the spells are weakening so much, that would have had to be taken into consideration in the Death Eater plans when Harry was first kidnapped. But even in Malfoy Manor, she can't think of anyplace else like that besides the dungeons. She chews on a fingernail, her mind racing.  
Unless…

_Oh, gods._

Yes, there is such a place, but only one.

_Nobody will ever find us here, he said. You're safe here, Ginny, and so am I.  
_  
Draco Malfoy's rooms, protected by spells that even the Dark Lord himself could not break. Was it possible that Harry had somehow been held _there_ for two years?

There's no point in going up to the fourth floor, of course. If Voldemort couldn't have broken into Draco's rooms, then clearly _she_ can't do it. If she tries, she'll undoubtedly be caught by spying house-elves, thrown in the dungeons herself, and passed round as a Death Eaters' play-toy before Draco even returns from his errand. It would be the height of lunacy to go up one stair. The best thing to do would be to turn around right now and run all the way back to Wiltshire, take the train back to London, and explain to the entire Order that the mission had failed.

And abandon her brother.

Ginny forces her feet to move up the stairs. They drag at every step; it feels like walking through murky water filled with malevolent sea-creatures that want to pull her down and drown her. She hesitates on the fourth-floor landing. Her brother's face swims up in front of her. _Ron, Ron, oh Ron._

She stands in front of the elegant gold and white door to Draco's rooms for several minutes before she can raise her hand to it. There really is no point in using a wand for this spell and she knows it; either this sort of Opening charm will work, or it won't. It has nothing to do with wizarding magic. It's one of the old primal magics that she once learned about surreptitiously in the Forbidden Books section at Hogwarts, from one of the parchments that Ron would have had an apoplectic fit if she'd known she'd read. She is very glad that she remembers a few of these charms now, no matter how vaguely. If it works, if this door opens to her now, it will be because of what she had done in this room with Draco Malfoy on a warm May night two years before, and for no other reason.

"_ Abent,_" she whispers, and the door swings open.

For an instant, all she can think is that the room is the same, exactly the same, as if frozen in time, as if preserved by a magic spell, except that no magic spell works this well anymore. No. It is as if time itself has turned back. She tiptoes in, hardly daring to breathe, moving past the impossibly elegant ebony bureau, the pearwood sofa with its embroidered rose cushions that look too unimaginably perfect to sit on, the cold fireplace with the white and gold columns and engraved fleur de lis, the inlaid teak table with the gold baroque scrolls on its legs, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves with the leather-backed books… oh, gods, it's all, all exactly the same as it was two years before. And the bed! There's the huge four-poster canopy bed with its dark woods and elaborately draped curtains. Ginny's cheeks burn. She remembers that bed so well. All too well. There are times when she's wished that she could burn the memory out of her head, or cut it out, but she knows that she never could.

Abruptly, she looks away. One wall still has that enormous mirror framed in gold, the one with the ridiculous carving of the Malfoy crest on top, all dragons and eagles and soppy-looking house-elves and the gods only know what else. She teased Draco about it the first time he was here, and he laughed, and said that she didn't have to look at the crest—there was a _reason_ why it was on the wall across from the bed. He'd raised one eyebrow and smirked at her. She'd suddenly realized what he meant, and primly blushed. But she could feel a sort of tug between her legs, too, _not_ that she'd ever admit it, and she hadn't been able to keep the sudden image from her mind of herself and Draco intertwined on that bed, reflected in the mirror—

Ginny walks up to the mirror and deliberately pats her hair, running her fingers through it, trying to comb out the tangles. _Why did I think that Harry would just be casually be sitting around Draco Malfoy's bedroom, or Ron, either?_ she thinks tiredly. _What if they're both somehow shielded by magical spells? What if the Death Eaters have figured out how to do it even though we can't? What if— what if, what if, what if._ She gives a long, exhausted sigh. She looks pale and drawn, and her eyes are dark and enormous. She feels like a fool.

"Shite," she mumbles, aware of how ridiculous it is to say aloud what she is about to say. "On top of everything else, I look just bloody _awful._"

Something moves in the mirror. Her heart stops, simply stops for a beat, before it picks up and thumps so rapidly that it feels like it is going to take off. A shimmering, silvery head is shaking from side to side. _It's been there all along,_ she realizes. _I only see it now because it's moving. What the hell else is going on that I don't see?_

Draco Malfoy rises from one of the elegant chairs at the far end of the room and walks towards her with all the elegance and grace of a dancer, just as he has always done. It's a long walk; she has more than enough time to try to get away from him. She doesn't try. Clearly, there's no point. He stops just behind her.

"No, you don't," he says. "You're beautiful, Weasley. You could never be anything else." Then he shuts his lips tightly, as if he's already said too much, more than he planned to say, more than he wanted to say.

He moves closer to her. She sees his face in the mirror next to hers, and even through her terror, she can't help thinking, as she has always thought, that he is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen.

Then Ginny closes her eyes, because she has to. "Oh, gods," she can hear herself whimpering, hating the cowardly sound of her own voice. "You knew, Malfoy. You knew all along that I was coming here."


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: Thanks to all readers and reviewers, especially Eruanna Saerwen and veronica21.

This chapter contains mature content and themes. Y'all have been warned.

"No," says Draco. "No, I didn't. But, Weasley, why did you?"

"You did, and you know perfectly well why, Malfoy!" insisted Ginny. "You laid a trap, and you've been waiting for me."

"I didn't know you were here until an hour and a half ago," said Draco. "You disturbed the spells around the Manor then."

She blinked. "But the way I came in—I didn't think it would affect any spells. I was right, then. The Death Eaters really have figured out a way to use magic, or you've figured it out for them, rather. Haven't you?"

"No," says Draco in a very clipped voice. "You caused a disturbance in the primal magic here because of… because…" He cuts himself off and does not look at her, but she can look into his eyes in the mirror, and she knows exactly what he is talking about. She can feel something within her starting to tremble unbearably, something that will fall apart within minutes, _seconds._

"There's no point in playing games now, is there?" she asks. "Why don't you just tell me the truth? You knew I came here to find Harry and—and-" At the last second, she avoids saying Ron's name. She's not sure why, but she's learned over the past two years to trust her instinct, and some inner voice is beginning to wonder if it would be wise to let Draco Malfoy know that the Order thinks, that _she_ is so sure, that her brother is at the Manor.

Draco's eyes darken. He takes Ginny's arm in an iron grip and leads her away from the mirror, seating her stiffly in a chair. "Are you saying that the Order actually thinks Potter is here?"

"Yes," said Ginny. "It doesn't make any difference now for you to know that. So you won't have to torture it out of me, Malfoy. "

He gave a short laugh. "You can't be bloody serious. He's never been here."

"He's never been—what do you mean?"

"Just what I said." Draco studies her. "Did you seriously think we kidnapped him? We didn't."

"But then what happened to him?"

"I assure you, I don't have the slightest idea." He quirks an eyebrow. "Don't tell me you were counting on Potter coming back to save the day?"

"I…" She really can't think of anything to say.

"Because if you were, then you can't win this game, silly girl. With your all-important king missing, you don't even have any reason to keep up the fight, do you?"

His tone is so superior, so mocking. He's lying to her. Of course he is. He _must_ know where Harry is. And if he knows that, then he knows where her brother is, too. Tears prickle at the corner of her eyes. "But you do know about Harry, Malfoy," she says, and she just can't keep her voice steady. "Oh, sweet Merlin, can't you just tell me? It can't make any difference now." _Because I'll never get out of Malfoy Manor now,_ she thought. _I'll be held prisoner here… if I'm lucky._

He is studying her closely. "Of course, I'm sure that not knowing Potter's whereabouts must have distressed you deeply over the past two years," he says.

"How could it not?" she asks bitterly. If they'd had Harry, the war would have been _won!_ He'd just thrown that in her face. What more was there to say?

"Yes, how could it not, all right…" He looks away from her for a moment. "So you've really thought I knew all along what happened to him? Once and for all, Weasley, I don't. I don't have the slightest idea, any more than I know what really happened to the Dark Lord—yes, yes, I know what Potter said, but nobody else was there, were they?"

He has hit on her own suspicions, the one that nobody else seems to share, but this is painful too. It only reminds her of how it used to seem that their minds worked in sync, as well as their bodies. "Yes. We've always thought you knew. That's why the Order planned for me to come here to look for him. We had to do something. It's been two years, it's seemed hopeless, but we couldn't just give up on him!"

Draco's face has been darkening like a thundercloud throughout her entire speech, and it finally explodes. "_We?_ Potter's bloody _useless_ and always has been. You've always been the brains behind the resistance, and we both know it; all of the Death Eaters know it, so let's drop the stupid fucking game, shall we? _You're_ the one who really can't 'just give up'. You, the unofficial Potter widow-"

Her chair scrapes on the inlaid wooden floor, and they face each other down, like the enemies they are. "Malfoy, are you absolutely mad?" she demands. "That was almost _two years_ ago. That was a load of publicity shite spewed out for the _Daily Prophet_ by Rita Skeeter—she's even the one who made up that phrase—"

He laughs without humor. "So you weren't his adoring girlfriend then, stuck to the side of the savior of the wizarding world like a limpet?"

"Uh—" She squirms. How could she sort out the half-truths in Draco's statement and explain them, even if she wanted to, even if he'd listen to her?

"I see. I see. You weren't planning your white wedding with him? I remember that article, all right." Draco leaned so close to her that she could see the darker gray flecks in his silvery eyes. "Of course, Rita Skeeter didn't know it was already too late for that by the time Potter got round to you, did she?"

Ginny jerks back so that he can't see the tears starting in her eyes at his deliberate cruelty; he doesn't deserve to know that he's hurt her; he's going to hurt her enough after this, he's hurt her enough already, but he follows her.

"So what were you to Potter, exactly?" he demands in a low, deadly voice. "What was he to you? And tell me, if you don't mind terribly, because I've always wondered about it—just how long did you wait after me to jump into bed with him? Two weeks? One week? Was it even one fucking _day_, Weasley? Did he get my sloppy seconds? Did he ever know, did he ever _guess_, did you ever call out my name, did you ever hold him in your arms and wish that I were in his place, did you ever wish you'd taken the bargain I offered you, wish you'd done what I'd _begged_ you to do; no Malfoy ever begs for anything but you made me beg, Weasley, so did you tell Potter about that, and did both of you laugh about what you'd done to me while you _fucked_ him, did you laugh and laugh and _laugh_ over the fool you'd made of Draco Malfoy-"

Ginny hauls back and slaps Draco across the face, hard. They stare at each other. He has a perfect red print of her hand across his pale skin.

"I came here to find Harry because Hermione said he was here, and because I had no choice," she says passionately. "I came here to find my brother because I had to, because I felt like I'd die if I didn't. And Ron's here, Malfoy, I know he's here! If you don't want to tell me if Harry's here, if you don't even know if he's here or not, well, I'm not so sure I care anymore. Just tell me where Ron is. Just rescue Ron. Just give my brother back to me. I'll do anything, Malfoy, anything."

His face doesn't change, but he keeps looking at her. _He knows. He knows exactly where my brother is._ Ginny is as sure as if she's been given the answer by primal magic, and perhaps, she thinks, she has. _No matter what it takes, I'm going to get him to tell me._

Draco opens his mouth to say something, but he doesn't say anything, and Ginny can't wait. She catapults herself into his arms, kissing him frantically, his mouth, his neck, yanking the buttons of his shirt open, reaching round to cup his arse, reaching down to try to get between his legs, and all the time begging, begging, begging him to tell her where Ron is.

'Please, please, please. I know you're angry, I know you can't forgive me, and you don't have to, don't forgive me, if you want me, Malfoy, you can have me," she babbles as she struggles to touch him and he tries to hold her still. "I'll do anything you want. Anything—"

"No, Weasley, no—"

"I'll let you shag me again, isn't that what you want? I know it is. I can tell. You don't have to say, you don't have to admit it, you don't have to say anything, I'll get into this bed and you can have me right now, just tell me what you want me to do, because I'll do anything, anything at all—"

"Stop it! Stop!"

He traps her hands at her sides, restraining her, and finally she breaks into wild crying, collapsing against his chest and sobbing into his shirt.

"Shh," he says over and over again, stroking her back. "Shh."

"I'll do anything," she repeats, hopelessly.

"You don't have to," says Draco at last. "I've already let your brother escape."

Her head jerks up. "Wh-what?"

"I arranged for him to escape the dungeons this morning," says Draco. "That's why I came back early. I never had any hand in capturing him in the first place; that was entirely Mulciber's doing. As soon as I found out, I knew that I'd have to make sure of his safety. He was slated for torture today; I had that order cancelled, arguing that we'd never information out of him that way, and I had a trusted house-elf open the lock on his cell. Ron Weasley got out at eight o'clock, and I was, of course, shocked and infuriated when the news reached me in Munich, which was my _official_ location at the time. "

Ginny stares at him numbly. "I… uh… I thought the cells in the dungeon were protected by very old, very powerful Locking spells. By earth magic. I wouldn't have thought that just opening them would have been enough to let anyone escape." That seems to be all she can think of to say at the moment.

"Oh, it wouldn't have been," says Draco. "But there are older magics than that. How did you open this door?"

She looks away from him slightly. "Uh… with the _Abend_ spell." She knows that he knows what sort of older, more powerful magic allowed her to do it just as well as she does.

"Your brother could tap that power through the blood bond, although he wasn't aware of it," says Draco. "Don't think he was. He simply thought he escaped on his own."

"Thank all the gods Ron didn't know," Ginny says fervently.

He smiles crookedly. "I've got to agree with that. Otherwise, I really think that your brother might have found that killing me was a more attractive option than escape from the Manor, even at this late date."

Ginny keeps looking down at the coverlet. It is the same one she remembers from two years before.

"You saved him," she says.

"Someone else got him off the grounds safely," said Draco. "Never mind who. You've got a mole in the Resistance, let's just say."

"But it was you who saved him," said Ginny.

"It wasn't the first time I've done it," says Draco.

"You saved _me_ a few months ago too, didn't you? And then again last week."

"Yes." Draco's lips tighten. "I've saved you more times than you could guess."

"I think I've always suspected it," Ginny says thoughtfully. "I've tried to do the same for you. There are times when the Order possibly could have even won the entire war, or civil war, or whatever this really is, except that I couldn't plan the battles well enough, because I had to save you. You've been my weakness, Draco Malfoy."

"And you've been mine, Ginny Weasley," he says.

"Do you regret it?" she asks, as if her question contains no more than simple curiousity.

"No," he says. "I'm very selfish, you see. And if you had died…" He doesn't finish the sentence. "So no, I can't regret doing anything I had to do to keep you alive."

"Me neither," said Ginny. "I mean, I'm glad that you kept _me_ alive, obviously. But I can't regret doing what I had to do to keep you alive… Draco." It is the first time she has called him by his first name since that day two years before, and she knows that he remembers too.

"I saved you when I could," he says. "Every time I could. Ginny, you need to leave, _now._"

"No," she says.

They are both silent for a moment, then. Ginny looks down at Draco's large, strong hand. Hers would fit neatly into it. She wants to move her hand and test the fit as much as she wants to take the next breath of air. She feels a tremor go through her entire body, and when she glances up, she thinks she sees him shuddering minutely, too.

"Now what?" she asks.

Then she knows the answer to that question. So she answers it herself, by leaning forward and kissing him.

He shudders so hard that she's afraid he will fall, but they're already on a bed, after all, so it wouldn't make much difference. She kisses him again. His breathing quickens. She runs her hand down the side of his cheek in a gesture that she remembers he always loved. He places his hand over hers.

"Don't do this," he says hoarsely.

"I have to," says Ginny.

"You don't understand. Why did you have to come here now, _now_ of all times, Ginny?" he groans. "You _can't_ do it—will you just listen to me—"

"You can't think I'm doing this as some sort of thanks for saving Ron, can you?" she demands. "I want this, Draco Malfoy. I've dreamed about it every single day and every single night for two years."

He lets all his breath out in a rush. "Oh fuck, so have I," he says, as if giving up, giving in, and then he does fall, but towards her, and because she falls towards him too, they are two failings who become firm, and they come to rest in each other. Except that they don't come to rest at all, of course.

It's been so long, she thinks feverishly, so very long, for her anyway, and she wonders if it's been very long for Draco too, but she won't ask him. Nothing has ever felt so wonderful and right as his hands pulling off her blouse and her trousers and her bra and her knickers; she yanks off his clothing as fast as she can, they can't get to each other fast enough, and when they are finally naked in each other's arms and she feels his body against hers again, she starts crying with relief. He looks horrified until she manages to choke out, "Oh, gods, I've wanted you for so long, Draco, I've wanted this so much," and he whispers, "I never thought I'd have you like this again."

The words are so awful that she has to ward them off by running her hands all over him, frantically, and she writhes and moans as he touches her and she feels his big hands everywhere on her again, but she can't wait long. "Please," she begs. "Please." He groans and moves on top of her, and she spreads her legs for him, and she feels a rush of moisture at the long-forgotten sensation of his fingers between her thighs, stroking her, readying her body for him. The first little twinges ripple through her, but she shakes her head. Not yet, not yet. He adjusts himself, and she catches her breath. How can this feel so familiar, when she's only felt him this way once in her life before?

He begins to push his hips forward, and she winces. "Am I hurting you?" he whispers.

"No, no," she says. "It's just been such a long time, and you're so big there— oh, don't give me that look!" She smacks the back of his head.

'Slowly," he says. "I'll go as slowly as I can—oh, Ginny, oh, _fuck_-" He begins to slide into her and he does go exquisitely slowly, his face tightening as if in agony. Inch by velvet inch, he moves into her, stretching her, widening her, until he gives an intense groan and she knows that she has taken him in all the way.

She is filled with him from top to bottom, and the sensation is so exquisite that she wants to cry again, but she knows that they've only started and she is determined not to miss a moment of this. "_Now_", she says, and she pumps her hips up at him, and he pushes back down at her and they move together like two halves of a whole, reunited at last. He reaches down and strokes her expertly as he fills her steadily with himself, over and over again, and she gasps in astonishment. The most intense climax she has ever known slams into her in savage waves.

He swears hopelessly and comes instantly, and she feels the hot endless rush of his climax. But he murmurs "give me a moment, just a moment," and he grows hard inside her, and he is ready for her again. And for this stolen time in Draco Malfoy's bedroom in the headquarters of the Death Eaters, so endless and so brief, they are both inexhaustible.

Afterwards, she lies on his chest, and their breathing slows. "Are you all right?" Draco asks her.

"All right?" she echoes. "That was… it was…" She hits him over the head again, just for his disgustingly self-satisfied look.

"It's been so long," he murmurs. "Too long, Ginny."

"How long has it been?" Ginny wants to bite her tongue as off as soon as the question even started to escape her lips. She _really_ doesn't want to know the answer.

Draco looks at her narrowly, as if thinking over exactly what sort of answer to give. "Quite some time," he says, his voice neutral.

A funny little flutter begins in Ginny's stomach. She tries to ignore it. "Oh," she says. _Well, that would certainly explain why that first time was so fast. And it might help to explain why there was a second time right after that, a much slower, longer one, though. And a third…_

He turns to her, very suddenly. "How many?" he asks.

"What?" she stammers. He has caught her off guard. She expected Draco to ask how long it had been for her, and then maybe she could change the subject after that, somehow.

"How many men, after me? Since me?"

"Just one," she says, unable to lie.

Draco is silent. He certainly has to know who this is, the only other man she has ever slept with, the only other boy she has ever thought she loved. She knows he knows, without being told. He surely would have been happier if her record matched his own, or at least what she thinks his had to be, if she'd had a dozen other men, twenty, thirty, a hundred even, if it just means that she hasn't had that one. Just not Harry Potter. Ginny knows that as well.

"Why did you start coming on the raids about six months ago?" she asks suddenly. "You never did that before."

"Because my father died," he says, as if it is an answer. "I wanted—I thought—" He breaks off ,sounding uncertain. "I wanted you to see me, Ginny. I had to see you."

Something flutters in her chest, like a very small butterfly. She does not, she will not, try to give it a name.

He strokes her side, shoulder to waist to hip, and she feels him take a deep breath.

"Do you miss him very much?" he asks, his voice deliberate, like a man running a knife over his own flesh to watch the line of blood flow. "Potter?"

"I don't miss him at all," says Ginny, her voice just as deliberate.

He strokes her in the same way for several more minutes, like a cat.

"The last time you were here," he says, "I never should have let you get out of this bed."

"You didn't let me go," says Ginny. "I left."

"Well, I shouldn't have let you leave, then. What do you think about that?"

Ginny feels exactly as if she is perched on a cliff, peering over the edge of an abyss. The slightest move could cause her to plummet to her doom.

"I don't know," she says, and she is not so sure that her careful words will keep her from falling after all.

He rolls over onto his back, taking her with him. "I'm so tired, Ginny," he murmurs. "I haven't been sleeping lately."

"Neither have I," she admitted.

"I think I could sleep now, with you here," he says. "Stay with me."

She nods, not quite trusting herself to speak. He moves behind her and curls into her, spoon-fashion, and in only a few minutes, his breathing has become soft and regular, ruffling the back of her hair.

_Stay with me._

His words follow her into the dream.


	3. Chapter 3

A/N: Thanks to all readers and reviewers, especially Marinka. More mature themes here. Yay.

+++

Draco turned violently when he saw her standing there on the sunporch of Malfoy Manor for the second time. It was on a cool early evening in late spring, nearly a year after the first time and about a month before the last battle of Hogwarts, although neither of them knew about that then, of course.

"Oh, fuck, Ginny, what are you doing here?" he exclaimed.

"I don't know," she said.

"I thought—I was sure you'd never—" He broke off. "I never thought I'd see you again," he finally said.

_I never did either,_ she thought but didn't say.

"You shouldn't be here," he said. "It's so dangerous. Too dangerous. Ginny, you've got to get out of here."

She shook her head. "It's not so dangerous. It's May Day. Nobody will miss me."

"Ginny, what's going to happen soon- Go back to Hogwarts. It's not like it was last year; the Carrows are keeping track of every student. You've got to go back. I wish I could. I wish I was there," he said, and an expression of terrible sadness passed over his face. "I wish I were anywhere but here. Except for right now. Because you're here, and I'm selfish."

They stood and looked at each other for a little while longer, until he finally sighed, and told her to come into the house, because it was just too dangerous otherwise. Anybody could see her, after all. Then he had to take her by the hand and they had to run quickly up to his rooms by the back staircase, of course, because it was insanely dangerous to stay anywhere else. Ginny sat perched on the edge of the same chair where she'd sat one year before. He sat across from her.

The room was so quiet that she could hear him breathing. She wondered if he was trying to hold his breath. She knew that she was. She could hear laughter and music coming from outside, somewhere on the grounds.

"Some of the servants are celebrating," Draco said shortly. "They've got a Maypole up; I think you can just barely see it from here—I suppose they have something at Hogwarts."

Ginny shuddered. "I don't want to even know about it if they do."

"Fuck," he said. "I didn't even think about that. Thank all the gods you're not there. You can't go back. Don't you dare go back. It's too dangerous, but then, it's dangerous to stay here as well."

"Not now that we're here, in your rooms," she said. "We're safe."

He laughed. "No, we're not. _You're_ not."

"What do you mean?" she asked. "You'll keep me safe, I know you will."

Draco got up abruptly and stalked to the window, his hands gripping the casement. "I suppose you wish you were with Potter, wherever he is," he said. "Celebrating May Day."

"No," she said. She came up to stand behind him. They were raising the Maypole out on a green lawn; she could just barely see it, and the dancing thrummed in her blood like the beating drums. She looked at the back of his strong hand, at his white knuckles, at the tendons in his arms.

"You two could have a bloody celebration, all right," he said. "Wouldn't you like that?"

"No," she repeated.

"Isn't he what you want?" Draco asked. "Potter? Don't you wish he'd taken you with him?"

"No," she said for a third time.

"You still shouldn't have come here," said Draco. "Potter has something to offer you, when he returns, and you know he'll return. He's the fucking hero, he's got to return. I'm not the hero. I have nothing for you, Ginny. Why did you come here?"

She couldn't answer him. Now that she was here, she wanted to convince herself that she really didn't quite know why she'd come. She looked at the curve and play of his tense shoulders under his thin white lawn shirt, and a wave of weakness ran all through her. She grabbed onto the back of the chair behind her. _Oh, gods! I know…I know…_

She wanted to slip that shirt off of him and bite at his skin. She wanted to run her fingers along his corded arms and feel his fingers encircle her wrists, none too gently. She wanted to recreate that last moment on his bed from one year before, when he was starting to undo the buttons on her blouse and her black lace bra was just beginning to peep out from underneath and the swell of her breast was barely visible and his eyes went to it like magnets to metal, and he was pushing her down onto the mattress, and she stopped him. She wanted to start time up again. She wanted him to finish what he'd started then.

"Because I had to," she said. She pulled at his arm and forced him to turn round, facing her. She looked up at him pleadingly, unable to speak.

"Shite! I should have known." Draco shook his head, as if she'd just confirmed his worst fear rather than offering him his greatest desire. "Ginny, you're only doing this because it's May Day. You feel the power of primal magic here, in this place, on this day, and it's because of what you've done with me before, in this room. It's only that it's all hitting you at once, but that's all it is."

The drums outside drifted up the room and beat harder and harder, faster and faster, and Ginny's blood thrummed too, itching and burning, a torture in her veins.

"But I feel this, I _need_ this, so much," she said desperately. "And you feel it too, you have to, I know it, you can't turn me down, you just can't—"

"Oh, yes I can!" he growled. "Ginny, you have no idea what's about to happen to me, and soon. No idea at all. You don't know what sort of ungodsly mess I've got myself into; no, I've been _forced_ into it but I can't get out now, the best thing you can do is to get the hell out and never see me again. I can't drag you into this. I can't do this to you. I'm getting you out of here right now; there's got to be someplace safe—"

She barely heard him. The pull of the oldest magic had hit her too hard, and when he grabbed her hand, the drumming in her body exploded. She threw herself against him and started kissing him, inexpertly, frantically; he pleaded with her to stop but she wouldn't listen to him, and finally he gave a groan of surrender, picked her up, and threw her on the bed, half landing on top of her.

She had won, Ginny thought muzzily, and her desperate desire slowed and calmed a bit with the knowledge of that victory. "We're going to do this, right?" she whispered to Draco.

"Don't ask fucking thick questions like that. Nothing could stop me now," he said, with a little laugh that sounded more like a sob. "Probably not from the moment I first saw you on that sunporch."

"Then do something for me," she said. "Lower me down to the bed just a bit, and start undoing the buttons on my blouse—no, Draco, just one or two, so you see the edge of my bra. Now stop. Now wait a moment."

He shivered, looking down at her, his eyes darkening to steel. "Are you trying to torture me? It's working splendidly."

She felt the pulse of insistent desire in her body, and then she nodded her head. "Now go on. Do what you wanted to do last year."

"Oh, gods, yes," he said, almost reverently, and he leaned forward, and Ginny sighed at the utter bliss of going on, of doing more, of doing everything, of letting the steady pulse of lust in her blood overwhelm her and have its way.

Draco stripped off the clothes she could not bear to wear for one more instant, and she pulled at his clothing too because it was unbearable for them to be separated by anything, and then at last there was nothing at all between them and his hands and mouth and fingers were everywhere, all over her body. She had barely had one stitch of clothing off in front of a boy before in her life but it just didn't matter, and she explored his naked body greedily, although her courage failed her a bit when she moved below his waist. He bent his head down to suckle at her nipples, moving back and forth from left to right, and she gasped at the insistent pull between her legs; his fingers moved steadily between her thighs and she cried out.

"Let me," he murmured, and she nodded and he stroked her and stimulated her every nerve and oh, oh, her body tightened and tightened and then exploded perfectly in his hand. He kept moving his fingers and she moaned in astonished delight as the waves of pleasure ran through her again and again, and she whimpered in protest when he pulled away.

"Ginny, I just have to," he said. "I can't wait anymore."

She knew what he was talking about, and for a second, it was as if a bit of clarity broke through her hazy mind, through the pounding desire and the uncontrollable need. _It's going to happen,_ she thought. _It's really going to happen. Right now. I am about to have sex. Is this what I want, though? Do I actually want Draco Malfoy to be my first?_

"I don't… uh…" He hesitated. "I don't really know what this experience will be like for you."

She blinked. "Don't you know? How can you not know? I thought you were the Slytherin sex god."

Draco looked at the floor. "Uh…"

"Don't tell me that you're a virgin as well!"

"No," he said. "No, I'm not. But I've only ever done this with one woman, and she was very experienced, so I don't really know how this will work out for a girl who's never done it before. But I don't have the best feeling about it, to be honest. And it's been almost two years. So I doubt I can be as gentle as I'd like. I'm rather bloody desperate by now. Oh, fuck, Ginny, I'll explain later if you really want to know. I just, uh…"

Draco looked at her, and for a moment, he didn't look like the cold, bitter Malfoy heir at all, the one who was too old and weary and wary for his years, but only an anxious seventeen-year-old boy. "I just have to know that you really want me," he blurted. "Not that you're half-mad because it's May Day and you're at Malfoy Manor and you feel the power of this place and this land and Stonehenge, but that you want _me_, me, and that you'll understand and forgive me if this part isn't very good and if I have to hurt you and if you don't like the first time very much, I tried to at least make the orgasms really, really good for you, I did, I tried as hard as I could—"

Ginny put a finger over his mouth. "Shush", she said. "I want you, Draco. You. Just you."

He groaned, and he moved forward to kiss her, and somewhere in the middle he took her hand and moved it down and put it somewhere that almost frightened her, and she swallowed hard. She let him push her back on the bed and spread her legs apart, and he knelt between her thighs for a moment and then slid up, and muttered an apology, and started entering her. And it did hurt, very much, even though she knew that Draco was as gentle and careful as any seventeen-year-old boy who hadn't had sex in almost two years could possibly be. But somehow the pain didn't matter.

"I'm hurting you. I'm hurting you, I know I am, I should stop," he kept whispering, and she kept gritting her teeth and saying "no, no, don't you dare," keeping her aching thighs spread wide. She wondered if Draco actually _could_ stop even if he tried, because he alternated all the agonizing over her pain with groans of _, Ginny,_ and all the time he kept pushing himself into her relentlessly and that part of him just seemed so _big,_ and she'd never expected this first bit to take so long or to be so painful and she didn't know how much longer she could keep from crying or doing something awful so that he'd know how much it really did hurt, until finally he gave a strangled sort of yelp and he was completely inside her and there was no more of him to take.

She could feel tears gathering in the corners of her eyes anyway, although it wasn't from the pain. She had done it. She had chosen him, she had given him this, and now she could never go back.

"Ginny, Ginny," Draco whispered, and he lifted her hips and began to pump into her body, over and over again. Each thrust was painfully delicious and she pushed back at him because even though that made it hurt more, she _had _to move with him, she just had to, and his breathing got faster and faster and then he shuddered and grew rigid and she felt him filling her with the hot rush of his pleasure and finally holding her as if he would never let her go. But he did let her go, all too soon.

Draco moved back so that his face was shielded by darkness, afterwards, and she could not quite see his expression. "Are you all right?" he asked.

"Yes," she said.

"It didn't hurt too much?"

Ginny thought about how to answer that. "It did hurt," she said. "But it didn't matter, Draco. It really didn't matter."

They both fell silent. Draco had moved a bit away from her, Ginny suddenly realized, towards the other side of the bed. The sun had gone almost all the way down now over the horizon; she could see it outside the bay window. The room was growing a bit cold. She couldn't hear the music any longer, or the dancers, and it was too dark to see the Maypole. There ought to be more; shouldn't there be more? But maybe not. It really would be dangerous to stay much longer, she knew. She picked up her blouse and started putting it on, then felt around on the floor for her shoes. Draco clamped his hand down on her arm.

"Just where do you think you're going, Ginny?"

"Well—" she stumbled. "Back to Hogwarts. They'll start missing me if I don't get back soon."

"Don't be an arse," he said. "You're not going anywhere. "

"Of course I am. If I don't get back there, the Carrows—" She shuddered. "You don't want to know. I don't want to think about it. Draco, let me go, I have to go."

He moved out of the shadows, and she saw that his eyes had gone icy cold. "No," he said. "You're staying here with me."

Her mouth dropped open. "I—I can't," she said.

"You can and you will. After this—" He spread a hand to take in the rumpled bed. "Ginny, you can't think I'll let you go away from me. You're mad if you think that."

Ginny sat down on the bed, all her breath going out in a rush. "Draco, I was actually hoping you would come back with me," she said carefully, her heart pounding.

His eyes narrowed. "Was that your plan all along?"

"I just… "She looked around helplessly. "Draco, I can't go back, knowing you're here, in this terrible place. Come back with me."

He shook his head. "I can't go. But you could stay—yes, you could, and you've got to. Ginny, don't go back to school. Stay in my rooms. Nobody will ever know you're here, Voldemort will never know—you'll be safe and protected."

She stared at him. "Draco, I can't! Don't you understand? Nobody else would be protected- my friends wouldn't be safe!"

His eyes darkened. "You'd be safe, Ginny. You're all that matters. Just which friends were you thinking of?"

"Well—everyone at Hogwarts," she stammered. Something had changed in that room, something in the atmosphere, something in Draco's face, and she didn't like it at all.

He rose from the bed. She started backing towards the door. He walked towards her, as graceful as a hunting cat.

"Who were you thinking of?" he repeated. "Potter? Is that who you meant? Well, I'm afraid I don't much care about keeping him safe."

"I wasn't talking about him, Draco! And I don't like your tone of voice. But if you must know, yes, I'd like him to be safe," she said defiantly. "He's trying to do something important, something meaningful."

Draco laughed. "I suppose you think he's on the side of all sweetness and goodness and light, don't you? Ginny, you don't know half as much as you think you do. I know what the Dark Lord is, I don't have any illusions about him, but if you just knew half of what I do about Dumbledore- If you knew what a psychopathic old fraud he was, how incapable he was of caring about anyone, if you knew how he didn't protect me or any of his students last year, how he let the Dark Lord use me to almost kill everyone in the school, you'd get off that high horse, and Potter worships the memory of Dumbledore's arse, of course—"

She closed her eyes, memories ripping through her. The smell of musty old books. The soft twittering of a phoenix on its perch. The soft, calm old voice saying horrible things.

_How very useful it will be if you agree. Otherwise, it may be regrettably necessary. All you will be required to do in return…_

"You don't know what you're talking about, Draco Malfoy!" raged Ginny. "You said yourself that something terrible is getting ready to happen here, and the so-called Dark Lord is going to be right in the middle of it, and I don't see you doing anything about it, so don't talk about Dumbledore or Harry or anyone else. And you think you'd be able to keep me safe in the middle of whatever horrible thing it is—don't make me laugh!"

Draco went red. "I could. I could! I'd find a way. I'd keep you in these rooms, I'd come to you every night, I'd do more for you than Potter ever could. He'd never offer you what I would. He'd never give you what I just gave you."

'How do you know? "demanded Ginny, knowing that she was saying terrible things, unforgivable things, standing appalled, apart from herself, hating herself for what she heard coming out of her mouth.

"What are you going to do now, Ginny?" Draco asked viciously. "Go off and find Potter and get into bed with him, so you can have a basis for comparison? Don't you dare. You stay here; don't you dare leave, I'll keep you safe, nobody else will ever have you, no other man can ever touch you—"

"You'll keep me safe as what, Draco Malfoy?" Ginny asked mockingly. "Your little sex toy? I think I'd rather take my chances with Harry." As soon as the words left her lips, she would have given anything, anything to take them back. She stared at the floor, her cheeks burning.

"So that's it, then," said Draco. "So that's why you shagged me—to get me to come over to the right side. What was this, Dumbledore's dying instructions? You're the Order's official little tart now? "

"That's not fair," mumbled Ginny, her eyes filling with tears.

"You do a damn good job, Weasley, I'll give you that," he said coldly. "You could work as a companion at the Crystal Palace. Do you want me to write you a reference?"

That was when she had slapped him, hard. He stared at her for a moment, a perfect red handprint on his deathly pale face. Then he gave her a little bow, and stepped back, elaborately allowing her space to leave the room. She could barely see her way out because of the tears, but she made it back to Hogwarts all right. She hadn't even been missed.

Ginny opens her eyes and looks at the walnut ceiling of the four-poster canopy bed. For a second, she is confused, torn between the past and the present. The sun is going down outside, almost completely sunk over the horizon, just as it was when she lay in this bed two years before, and this only confuses her more. Then she sees Draco lying by her side, and she notices the subtle changes that the past two years have caused in him. And she sees, too, that he isn't sleeping at all.

"Did you get any sleep?" she asks.

He nods. "A bit. I just woke up. You?"

"Same thing. I dreamed…" She shakes her head, trying to clear it. "I dreamed about that afternoon." He knows what she is talking about before she even finishes the sentence, she can tell, and she wishes that she hadn't said anything about it at all. But he only gives her a small, strange half-smile.

"I dream about it all the time," he says. There is no particular emotion in his voice.

She sits up, cross-legged. "I want you to know something," she said. "I understand, now, why you couldn't go. You couldn't leave your father, and your mother."

Draco nods. "That's right. But I don't know if _I_ understood that then. I certainly didn't tell you."

"I wish…" _Say it!_ Ginny took a deep breath. "Draco, I wish I had come to you when your mother died."

Half of Draco's mouth twisted up. "How could you have done, Ginny? You were still with Potter then, remember?"

"I ought to have done it," she said simply.

"Maybe so," he says.

"And I wish I'd understood that she was the real reason why you couldn't come with me, two years ago. But I was only sixteen years old, Draco. I couldn't understand. There were so many things I didn't understand."

"I couldn't understand either," he says. "Why you couldn't stay, I mean. But I think I do now… She isn't buried here. Did you know that?"

Ginny shakes her head. Of course she didn't; how could she have? But she can tell that Draco isn't really asking her.

"My father is laid away in the Malfoy catacombs," Draco goes on. "But my mother was buried with the Blacks. I've always been rather glad of that."

Ginny takes another deep breath. "Will you tell me something, Draco?"

"If I can."

"When are Mulciber and the rest coming back?"

He cannot look at her. She knows that she already has her answer. Everything that he has said today makes sense to her, every warning he has given her, but she knows that she could not have taken any of them. She could not have left him. She still can't.

"Any minute now," he says. "I tried to warn you, Ginny."

"I know," she says. "And I want you to know that I know something else, Draco." She looks at him calmly, looks right into his beautiful, unreadable, impenetrable gray eyes. "You can't let me go now. I don't mean that you're about to make the same offer you did when you were almost eighteen. I mean it's because of who you are, and who I am. You're the leader of the Death Eaters. I'm the brains behind the resistance.' She laughs ruefully. "You'd have thought that Hermione would be that, wouldn't you? But she isn't. They'll probably fall apart without me. That's why you can't let me go. When Mulciber and the rest do come back, you'll have to hand me over to them."

He is silent.

"You know it and so do I, Draco. You saved Ron, but you can't save me. If there's just one thing you could do… just save me from…" Her voice wavers. "You know. From torture. Because I'm brave, but I'm not that brave. I don't think I could stand up under it. You know I'll tell you anything you want to know anyway. And you know what I'm talking about- what torture means to Mulciber and his sort. Not physical pain, because I could probably bear that. No. You know what they do. They take girls, and they—" She can't go on.

He turns and grips her arms, hard. "Do you really think, can you _honestly_ believe, that I would let Mulciber or any of the others get their hands on you, Ginny?"

She breathes a sigh of relief. "That's all right, then. That's all I was ever really afraid of, I think. Will they put me in Azkaban? No. The Dementors are gone, aren't they? I wonder where, then?"

"Will you just bloody well _shut up_ and listen to me?" Draco glares at her.

"Um… okay," says Ginny. "I just wanted you to know that I'm ready now, for whatever happens next, because I know you have to do it."

"You're going to stay with me," says Draco. "That's what happens next. Here, or somewhere else. Wherever you want to go."

Ginny knows all the reasons why she must not listen to another word he says, and they are like dry leaves blowing before a wild spring wind. "Why would you want me to do that?" she asks.

His mouth curves into a bitter half-smile. "Oh, you know, don't you?" he finally says.

"What?" she asks.

"I've lost the battle. I give up. I've given up." His muscles go rigid, as if he is trying to push her away slightly, fighting with himself, still holding onto her. His gray eyes are filled with pain.

"What are you talking about?"

"Because—" His face twists. "I… I… if I say this, I'm _lost_, but I'll say it anyway. You know what I mean, don't you?"

She looks into his eyes, and in that moment, she knows that she, too, has lost. She will stay with him no matter what it may cost her, but she does not show this decision in her face yet. Draco looks back at her, and his eyes are as guarded as if he expects her to take his heart in her hands and destroy it.

Her own heart begins to rush out, to expand, ready to overwhelm him with all the warmth he lacks, ready to cradle and comfort and soothe him, ready to love and love and love him until all his fears slip away in the safety of her arms. Now she will tell him the truth. She begins to speak, a smile starting on her face, looking into his beautiful gray eyes. The smallest spark of hope is beginning to form in their depths.

And then the door bursts open.


	4. Chapter 4

A/N: Thanks to all readers and reviewers, especially marinka and victoria21.

+++

Everything is noise and confusion and a swirl of light and color, Order members whipping wands and shooting spells and curses, and Ginny realizes that magic has suddenly and inexplicably started again, but only from their side. Hermione runs across the room, chasing Mulciber, hitting him with a spell that makes him go rigid and scream with pain; Anthony Goldstein takes out a couple of huge Death Eaters with a savage slash of his wand, blood pouring from their wounds; Cho Chang swirls her wand around a circle of black-cloaked figures and they all shrivel up, screaming horribly. Green light arcs from the fireplace to the mirror, reflecting across the room, dazzling Ginny's eyes.

"_Avada Kedavra!_" cries a harsh voice at the same moment, and at the end of the green arc, a dark, twisted thing convulses in agony and crumples to the floor. Then, suddenly, everything is silent.

Harry Potter steps forward, past the thing that was once Voldemort. He is pale and drawn, as if he's spent a very long time in solitary confinement, very far away from sun and light and air. _He has,_ thought Ginny numbly, and even without yet knowing the full story, she knows that she must be more or less right. He takes her hand. His is very, very cold. He pulls her off the bed, away from Draco's warmth. She struggles weakly, but his grip is like iron.

"I understand, Ginny," he says in his harsh voice. He sounds as if he hasn't spoken in years. "I see what you had to do. You had to… to sleep with Malfoy… or you couldn't get the power to get in here and to let me out. Hermione told me a few things after I escaped. I'm sorry, Ginny, so sorry that you had to sacrifice yourself for me. But you'll move past it- _we'll_ get past it. We'll move on. Maybe with a Memory charm, you can forget all about what you had to do with him—"

Ginny is never sure exactly when she began screaming. It might have been then. Or it might have been a few seconds later, when she saw Rita Skeeter and the photographers from the _Daily Prophet_ crowding into Draco's bedroom. Either way, there were words somewhere in her screams, something along the lines of _no, no, it's not true, none of it, that's not the way it happened at all,_ and then Rita's avid lacquered face was thrust into hers.

"Really?" Rita asks eagerly. "You mean the spunky, plucky Resistance leader Ginny Weasley willingly betrayed all her ideals in exchange for sweet, sinister, savage sex with the dark, delicious, hottie head honcho Death Eater, Draco Malfoy? What a story!"

Ginny sees Luna Lovegood pushing herself forward, taking her arm, steadying it. She is dimly grateful, until she hears Luna begin to speak. "What a lot of unnecessary alliteration," says Luna, with a notable lack of dreaminess in her voice. "That's not the way it was at all. It's just as Harry said. Ginny plotted to get into Malfoy Manor and rescue him from the deepest, gloomiest dungeons by shagging the Malfoy heir, because that was the only way to tap the primal power she needed in order to do it, and of course the heir is Draco Malfoy, so she needed to have sex with him and that's what she just did and that's why we just found her in bed with him. It's a very nice bed, by the way. The carpet's nice too, but I don't think they'll ever get the dead-Voldemort stain out of it now. Anyway, Ginny and I worked out the entire plan together and we didn't dare to tell anyone else—you know how the Sneaky Subgubulars are; they'll reveal your deepest secrets in a moment by crawling into your worst enemy's ears and whispering them all in iambic pentameter."

"Goodness." Rita Skeeter blinks. "But if I'm not much mistaken—and I never am—those primal-power spells only work if the two people involved have had some sort of, ahem, personal connection before. Doesn't that seem to imply a steamy sex scandal in the offing?"

"You're altogether too curious," says Luna. "Curious people are often attacked by Zigzag-Horned Snorkacks. They're very vicious, and quite fond of seeing if they can reshape their victims to match their horns. Their habitat includes the terrain surrounding Stonehenge, and I know the exact call that will summon them. This is for informational purposes only, of course."

Rita gulps. "Ah… of course. Colin, why don't you get some nice photographs of the Joyful Reunion of the Boy-Who-Lived-Through-A-Horrid-Year-And-A-Half-In-A-Dungeon-with-Voldemort and his faithful girlfriend Ginny Weasley? Perhaps the caption could involve some mention of 'setting the date for an autumn wedding'?"

"Oh, God," says Harry. "Can't somebody get her the fuck out of here? Creevey as well? And we've got to get Ginny out. Luna, can you get her other side, and for fuck's sake throw that robe on her, and tie it tight."

They are all moving her out of the room, and she desperately cranes her head to look back, to catch a glimpse of Draco, to cry out to him, _no, no, it's all a lie, there wasn't any plan, I didn't come here for that, you've got to believe me!_ There is a terrible commotion at the door, and for several minutes, they are all stuck. Grim-faced Aurors move past them in the other direction, and one figure is at the center of their group.

"_Fuck,_" mutters Harry.

Ginny looks up. The figure surrounded by all the Aurors, his wrists in chains, is Draco. His eyes meet hers. They are filled with stony hatred. She opens her mouth to cry something out. Luna steps on her foot. Draco gives a short, sharp laugh, and he jerks his head away from her. The Aurors pull him past the crowds, towards the door on the opposite side of the room.

"No, no, I didn't –" she starts to say, too late, but before she can add _I didn't betray you, Draco, I would've died before doing that,_ Luna reaches up and claps a hand over her mouth.

"She's been under so much strain," says Luna. "We've got to get her someplace where she can rest."

"Of course," says Hermione.

And they do. They give her Sleeping potions and Dreamless potions and Soothing potions and Tranquilizing potions, but she has dreams anyway. In one of them, the very first dream that she can remember, Luna stands by her bedside, putting her cool hands on her forehead.

"Don't touch me," says Ginny. "I hate you."

"I'm awfully sorry about that, but you'll understand soon," says Luna. "Ginny, don't tell anyone that you didn't really make that plan with me. The one to betray Draco Malfoy, I mean."

"Oh, all right," says Ginny, because she'd say just about anything to get Luna to go away. She closes her eyes and slips back into darkness. All too soon, she wakes up.

Hermione comes into Ginny's cozy room at the sumptuous new Order headquarters where she's staying until the new Weasley home is finished and explains everything to her, once they think she's strong enough to hear about it. Harry didn't really destroy Voldemort after all. Ginny was right all along, Hermione tells her, and yes, yes, they ought to have listened to her. It seemed as if he had done, but a bit of Voldemort's soul still remained intact, and it recaptured Harry a few months after the war was supposedly over and dragged him back into magical imprisonment in the dungeons of Malfoy Manor, because that is where the greatest concentration of magical power in Britain is located. That's why all of the wizarding magic had diminished so much; Voldemort was draining it by holding Harry captive there. And Ginny saved them all with her plan to get Harry out by sacrificing herself through tapping the oldest magic. This is the part where Hermione begins looking up at the ceiling. In order to do this, of course, it had indeed been necessary to, er, unite physically with the Malfoy heir. And this would indeed only work if, ahem, Ginny had once given her virginity willingly to this same Malfoy heir. Hermione didn't think that anyone else had really figured out this particular point. It especially wasn't necessary for Harry to be aware of it. Speaking of which, Ginny really ought to see Harry soon. He was so very grateful, and doing so very well, and Hermione herself was spending so much time with him lately, she says. Ron? How was Ron? Oh, she'd seen him a few times, Hermione says. _Luna_ certainly seemed to be spending a lot of time with Ron, Hermione says.

Ron visits Ginny, and he doesn't talk about what she had done with Draco Malfoy, or what she had sacrificed in order to get him or Harry out of the dungeons, or much of anything at all, really. He hugs her and sobs, and lies curled up next to her the way they sometimes used to do on rainy afternoons at the Burrow, and then tells her to get the hell out of bed and start living again. Ginny says that she'll think about it. She takes a chance and asks where Draco is now. Ron says that he's heard the Aurors thought about sending him to Azkaban, but they couldn't round up any Dementors, so they had to come up with something else. But he doesn't know any more than that.

After about a week, Luna appears in the doorway. Ginny glares at her.

"Don't come into this room," she says.

Luna does anyway, as Ginny knew she would. She sits in a chair by the bedside.

"I really do hate you," says Ginny.

"Yes, that's what you said last time,' says Luna.

"So that wasn't a dream," says Ginny.

"No, it wasn't. Did you ever tell anybody?"

"No. I mean, I never said there was a plan to… to betray Draco…" Ginny's throat closes up for a moment. "But I never said there wasn't, either. Luna, _why_? Why did you say that, why did you go along with Harry?"

"Because it was the only thing I could do. I realized that right away.'

"But _why_?"

"I can't tell you just now."

"You're going to have to do better than that!"

"Do you want to see Draco again?" asks Luna.

"Yes," whispers Ginny.

"Then you're going to have to be very clever, and very careful. Start getting out of bed. Start talking to Harry. Convince him that everything is all right, that you've had an awful shock, but that you're getting over it now. Then in about three weeks, I'll tell you what to do next."

Ginny grits her teeth. "Why should I trust you, Luna?"

Luna looks back at her with enormous silvery-blue eyes, and against her will, Ginny realizes that those eyes have always seemed to see more than they should. "Don't you know?" she asks.

Ginny thinks hard. "Draco said something about a mole in the Order," she says slowly. "Somebody who helped Ron get off the grounds of Malfoy Manor. That was you. Wasn't it?"

Luna nods.

"You love my brother. Don't you?"

"I always have," says Luna.

"And Hermione doesn't," says Ginny. "Not really." She swings her legs over the edge of the bed, wincing when her feet touch the floor. "I guess I'll just have to trust you, Luna." Strangely, tremulously, she does.

"I'm feeling so much better, Hermione," says Ginny the next day. "I think I'd like to see Harry soon."

The other girl's smile is a bit pinched.

_Oh,_ thinks Ginny. _So that's how it is. Well, Hermione can have him. But has Harry been informed of this little development yet?_

Not really, as it turns out. However, Ginny thinks that his eyes light up with self-importance and self-satisfaction when he sees her up and about, but nothing else. No. She thinks that she can see no more emotions than those, in Harry's eyes. She wonders if he has any real affection for her at all. Hermione will eventually console him quite nicely, she decides.

"What an ordeal it must have been for you, Harry," she coos, and that is all it takes to get him going. She scarcely has to say a single word for the next three weeks. Although she does feel sorry for him, and she does know that it must have been an ordeal to be trapped in a dungeon in Malfoy Manor with Voldemort for well over a year, she rather thinks that being trapped with Harry for the rest of her life would be even worse. Still, she smiles and nods and flatters his ego, and makes sympathetic noises, and encourages him to go off with Hermione whenever the other girl shows up for him, and watches them leave with a sigh of relief.

Harry wants to kiss her, and she allows it, knowing that avoiding it will seem too suspicious. She endures it. Harry wants to do much more with her. He wants to do everything that they did in those few months after the war ended and before he disappeared, in fact. Draco's bitter estimates had been off; she'd waited four months after him to go to bed with Harry in his rooms at Twelve Grimmauld Place, telling herself desperately the entire time that it was the right thing to do. She'd cried in the bathroom, afterwards, and the mirror had tried to soothe her. If she did it again now, she knows that she could not endure it. She tells Harry that she's simply been through too much lately, and that she needs time to allow the memories of Draco Malfoy to fade. They will never fade, but she doesn't tell him that. Harry brings up the idea of a Memory charm again, and she almost has to sit on her hands to resist the urge to punch him.

After three weeks, Luna comes to the Order headquarters at non with a picnic basket. Just a private lunch between us girls, she says, giggling, and Harry doesn't seem to notice that Luna has never giggled in her life before. He goes off to lunch with Hermione. In a tiny, private meadow, away from all prying eyes and curious ears, Luna tells Ginny what she needs to do next. And finally, Ginny understands it all.

"I need to go back to Malfoy Manor," says Ginny in her bravest, most resolute voice the next day.

"Ginny!" Hermione says in alarm. "Are you sure you're feeling quite all right?"

"Yes," she says, glancing surreptitiously into the mirror in her room. _Do I look determined and tragic-yet-ready-to-go-on-with-my-life enough, I wonder?_ "Hermione, it's something I have to do. I can't move on otherwise."

"I think it's a dreadful idea," Hermione says rather sternly.

Ginny decides that the time has come to bring out the big guns. She takes Hermione's hands and looks into the other woman's eyes. "It's something that I need for myself. Hermione, I've been trapped in a shame spiral with the memory of what I had to do with Malfoy. For closure, to heal my inner child, I've got to go back." Inwardly, she was grimacing. _This is really over the top. Is she actually going to swallow all of this Muggle American twelve-step-program rubbish-_

But Hermione's eyes are glistening with tears. "You're so brave, Ginny. I do think I understand now. Do you want me to go with you for support?"

"No!" The word comes out harsher than she'd intended it. "No," Ginny says more gently. "Hermione, it's just—it's difficult to explain, but I need to go there with someone who doesn't remind me of what happened, and both you and Harry do. It's not your fault, of course—" _oh yes it is,_ her mind adds involuntarily, "but I just can't help it. I'd like to go with Luna tomorrow."

Hermione puts her hand over Ginny's. "All right."

Ginny almost feels guilty. _Almost._

On her way to the door, Hermione pauses. "You don't want to actually _see_ him, do you?"

Does Hermione look just the tiniest bit suspicious? Ginny wonders. "Gods, no. I just have to go back to that place. I have to know that I can be there, and that nothing bad will happen to me."

The other girl hesitates, and then nods. "Okay. It's just that seeing Malfoy, or getting anywhere near him, really might be dangerous, Ginny."

"What do you mean?" _Dangerous for you,_ Ginny thinks scornfully. _Not for me._

"He's been put into the same cell where Harry was trapped with Voldemort for nearly a year and a half," says Hermione.

"_What_? Why?"

She shrugs. "It just seems… fair. And the effects it's probably had on Malfoy by now, after three weeks, after all that cruelty and evil that's seeped into the walls over the past year, well… I think it might very well be a bit dangerous to be anywhere near him by this point. Harry was protected by his scar through all that time; Voldemort absorbed everything. Malfoy doesn't have any protection like that."

"Oh," says Ginny. Her lips feel very numb.

"He deserves it," says Hermione. "Ginny, he more than deserves it. Draco Malfoy was in deep with the Death Eaters for two years, and he was unquestionably their leader for six months after Lucius died. Don't waste your pity on him."

"I'm not," Ginny says quickly.

"I really don't think you should go," says Hermione. "Or if you do, I think you should take me, or Harry, or preferably both of us."

"I'll be all right, with Luna," says Ginny. "And Hermione, I really do need to go."

She doesn't feel any guilt at all, now. Actually, she wishes that the entire ceiling would fall in on Hermione's head now, except that if it did, Harry wouldn't be standing next to her, and she really likes that idea as well.

The wheels of the car go round and round, and they seem to repeat the same rhythm all the way to Wiltshire.

_Did I come in time, did I come in time?_

Ginny didn't want to Apparate. Even though she could have done, it didn't seem right, somehow, and Luna said that she should probably trust her instincts. So they parked at Stonehenge, and now they are walking the outer grounds of Malfoy Manor together. The guards let Ginny in once they saw who she was; Harry or Hermione had apparently spoken to them, although she isn't sure if that makes her feel more or less uneasy. Another guard lets them in by a side entrance. Ginny doesn't dare to try to get in by the hidden door, of course; that isn't part of the plan.

The entire manor has been converted into makeshift Ministry headquarters; she sees that right away. The tight-lipped guard at the front desk checks her credentials. "Wands," he snaps, holding out his hand. Ginny stares at him blankly.

"All wands must be surrendered upon entry," he repeats.

Luna nudges her. Ginny gives him both their wands.

"It'll be all right," Luna whispers.

_Oh, gods, I hope so,_ thinks Ginny. They hadn't counted on this. They'd been so sure that they could use their wands to help fight their way out if they needed to; _now_ what? Well, no time to worry about that now. "Where are the dungeons?" she asks.

"You'd like to see the dungeons?" The guard's beetly little eyes are suspicious.

"Harry Potter must have sent you the message," says Luna. "Ginny Weasley needs to see the prisoner." Her voice is very assured, and Ginny arranges her face into a sad, brave look. A copy of the latest _Daily Prophet_ is open on the desk. Ginny could see only a few words of the headline. Something about a _Heroic Weasley_ something-or-other _Holding Up Under the Tragedy._ The guard nods.

Another guard, shorter and rather squat and bestial-looking, leads them down a dank flight of stairs, and then another, and another, and the light grows dimmer and dimmer. Torches stuck into the walls provide the only illumination, and they flicker fitfully. Still, they keep going down and down. They stop at a crumbling stone recess.

"Here," grunts the guard. "I've got to stay the whole time, of course."

"Of course," says Luna with a radiant smile. "Tell me, Slubgullion, do you know anything about the dangers of the Slurping Slashbuckler?"

"No. Can't say as I do."

"What a pity," says Luna, opening her hand. "For you, anyway." Something small and red flies out and sticks itself into the guard's neck. He goes down without a sound. "He'll wake up in about an hour with an awful headache," says Luna to Ginny. "You can go on in now."

_But can I?_ wonders Ginny. _Well, there's only one way to find out._ She bites her lip, and approaches the massive stone door. There is a tiny window at the very top, much too high for her to reach, and no obvious lock. She runs her hand along the crack of the door, praying that this will work, half-afraid of what will happen if it does.

"_Abend,_" she whispers.

The door melts into mist and re-forms around her, and when she opens her eyes, she is standing inside the cell.

It is tiny and bare, hewn out of the rock itself, with only one small torch stuck in the wall and casting long orange shadows over the uneven rock floor. Water drips steadily down another one of the walls. One small cot is tucked into a corner; a plate with an untouched bowl of soup and a slice of bread on it lies on a table. On a chair, facing the corner, sits Draco Malfoy. His back is to her, and his head is bowed.

Ginny grips onto the back of the cot to keep from falling; every kind of horrible emotion overwhelms her when she sees him in this unspeakable place, where she can feel the misery and evil and cruelty seeping from every square inch of the walls. He sits as still as a statue, and he's thinner than ever, how has he lost so much weight in only a month? She walks forward. Hasn't he heard her come in? Why isn't he turning round? _Is he… oh, please, gods, please don't let him be… he has to be all right, he just has to be…_ But she gets closer and closer, and he still doesn't make a move or a sound. She taps his shoulder, her heart sinking at how sharp his bones feel beneath his cloak.

"Draco?" she asks in a very small voice.

He whirls round and leaps up from the chair in one smooth motion, almost before she's even realized he's done it, and he slams her against the stone wall. She starts to scream. He clamps a hand over her mouth. Then he removes it.

"Go on," he pants. "Go on, Weasley, scream all you like! The guards won't come for you; they probably won't even hear you. Do you know how much screaming I've done since I've been in this hellhole? Do you think it's ever brought anyone here?"

She flinches back, but there is nowhere to go; she is already pressed all the way up against the wall. "Draco," she says. "Listen to me—"

His silvery eyes are bigger than ever in his pale, gaunt face, and they glow with hatred. "I don't want to hear anything, _anything_ you could have to say to me, you bitch. No—maybe I do—tell me why you came here, why don't you? To gloat? To spit on me? To laugh? Or have you already done your share of laughing with Potter? Why didn't you bring _him_ with you, Weasley?"

"Draco, it's not like that—" she tries to say, but his lips curl into a snarl.

"Don't ever do that again. Don't ever call me by my first name again. Fucking lying bitch. You betrayed me—"

"I didn't, I swear I didn't, if you'd just let me explain—"

"I don't want to hear your fucking _explanations!_" He grabs her shoulders and shakes her so that her head bobbles back and forth and she loses her breath, but her head isn't hitting the wall, she thinks dizzily, why not, he could really hurt her so easily but he isn't, so why isn't he?

"Please," she gasps. It is the only word she can get out. "Please. Please."

"Too late to plead with me," said Draco. "Just as it's too late for me to plead with you, Weasley. I know why you came here, though. You came to complete the process of driving me mad, didn't you?

"_No._ I swear I didn't, I just—'

"Oh, yes," he says. "I think I always knew you'd come here for that someday, from the moment they threw me in here and told me I'd never get out again. You did know that's what happened, right? How long ago was it? Feels like about a thousand years. But you look the same as you did when I went in, so that can't be right. Still so beautiful, G—no, I'll never call you that again, either. So beautiful." His hand goes up to caress her cheek, and she stares into his eyes like a mouse hypnotized by a snake. His silvery hair is wildly disheveled around his gaunt face and his eyes glow with something like madness, or if he isn't quite there all the way yet, she thinks in horror, he will be soon. _And he's still the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in all my life._

"Dr—Malfoy, listen to me," she says, trying to keep her voice even. "Something terrible is happening, this _cell_ is starting to drive you mad, if anything, but that's all it is—"

"Oh, no, I'm not mad yet," Draco says in conversational tones. "Don't think I am." He takes a curl of her hair and twines it round one of his fingers. "I've spent every minute of every day since I got here in hating you, you see, and that's kept me sane. I've never hated anyone or anything as much as I hate you now. It's rather a project." He cups her chin, and she shivers. "I gave you everything that a Malfoy should never give to anyone, and you used it to destroy me, Weasley. And the worst part of all is that I deserved it for being such a thick bastard, because I should have realized what was really going on years earlier."

He leans forward, as if to tenderly whisper secrets in her ear. "You've known all along, haven't you? The Order's been using you since you were fifteen years old to get at the secrets of the Death Eaters and Voldemort through me, and you let them use you."

Ginny closes her eyes, agony ripping through her. The truth, she thinks. The truth comes out at last, in this place of misery and suffering and death and evil, this place where there is no more room or time for lies or deception.

"I had no choice,' she whispers.


	5. Chapter 5

A/N: does not allow writers to block anonymous reviews anymore, and this is just vile. These cowards always leave flames, and they aren't even brave enough to do it under their own names. Also, their grammar, punctuation, and spelling are unfailingly terrible. Anyway… Thanks to all readers.

And YES- it's the last chapter.

+++

"So it's true, then," says Draco. "You admit it."

"Yes." It is a tremendous, horrible relief.

"Ah." He slumps back into the chair, as if his anger is spent, at least for the moment. "How did it happen, exactly?"

"Dumbledore called me into his office at the beginning of my fifth year," says Ginny. "He told me exactly what I'd have to do. I was supposed to date Harry as a cover as soon I could get him to do it, but my real mission was to get close to you. I was ordered to 'allow you certain intimacies'—his words, not mine—and then to build up to having sex. And he said I'd get power over you, because you would've had your pureblood initiation ceremony already."

"So that first time you came to Malfoy Manor over three years ago, you could have let me do it," says Draco. "I was sixteen years old. Why did you stop me?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you now," says Ginny. "Anyway, then he left instructions for me after he died. I was supposed to wait to have sex with you until the next May Day because then I could get the most power that way, and that's what I did."

"And you were ordered to convince me to come back with you to Hogwarts, where I'd be forced to reveal all of the Death Eaters' secrets," says Draco. "Never mind that this could have put my parents in appalling danger."

"Yes," says Ginny.

"And to think that I almost did it. If you'd asked me once more…just once…" Draco laughs, a hoarse, cracked sound. "So I was right, wasn't I? Your latest betrayal is just a piece cut from the same cloth. You used me to get Potter out, and then you washed your hands of me."

"That part _isn't_ true," Ginny says tightly. "But I don't expect you to believe me now."

"You're right about that."

She reaches her hand out to him, and then draws it back. "Malfoy, I want to tell you why I had to do all of those things. I said that I didn't have any choice, and I meant it, but I want you to know why."

"Don't you dare," says Draco, his eyes lighting up with fury again. "I knew you'd done all of this, Weasley; I'd figured it out since I'd been down here, but if you even try to give me some sort of _explanation_—"

"But then you'd see that I'm telling the truth now!" persists Ginny, coming closer to him.

"I mean it, if I hear one word—" snarls Draco.

'Draco, listen to me—" She reaches out her hand to him again, pleadingly, thinking that _if he knows, if he just knows_-

"Don't touch me!" he spits at her. "Don't ever touch me again, if you put one finger on me, just one—" He backs away and she keeps moving forward, her eyes begging him to listen, her arms outstretched, and finally she makes a grab for him.

Draco's hands go up to fend her off, instinctively, and she stumbles and starts to fall. He seizes her wrist. She struggles without thinking; even as thin as he's become, he is so strong, his fingers bite into her skin, and she knows that he is so angry and the guards can't hear her and he could anything he wants to do to her. And he knows her terrible secret now, the one she's hidden from everyone for well over three years now, the one she's kept separate and apart even in her own mind.

_You have a very important role to play in the resistance against Lord Voldemort, Ginny,_ Dumbledore told her that day when he called her into his office when she was barely fifteen years old, frightened by his piercing blue eyes that saw too much and the memories of just how much he knew about what had happened in the Chamber of Secrets with the shade of Tom Riddle. _How very useful it will be if you agree to perform certain… vital tasks, shall we say. Otherwise, it may be regrettably necessary to inform others of your role in opening the Chamber of Secrets… your friends, members of your family, Ministry officials, perhaps… how unfortunate if your father's position were endangered by public knowledge of his daughter's youthful indiscretions. All you will be required to do in return is to make yourself agreeable to this Slytherin boy, Draco Malfoy. And eventually, of course… to do more._ And she had whispered terrified agreement. Oh yes, she knew all too well then what Albus Dumbledore was, or could be. And now, the memories seem so _real!_

As she realizes too late, Draco is only trying to keep her from falling ungracefully on the stone floor. But because of her struggling, she does fall. She is still caught up in the fear and misery that overwhelmed her that day, the emotions she now wants to explain to him so much, and they seem almost palpable in this cell, pressing in on her with sinister force. When the floor rushes up to meet her, she sobs in horror. Draco tries to catch her, and she pushes his hands away, screaming.

"Don't! Oh, gods, don't! Don't touch me!"

Then she lies on her side on the floor, crying. He straightens up and looks at her. "I wasn't going to hurt you," he says slowly. "I couldn't hurt you. No matter what you've done to me, Weasley, no matter what you are, no matter how you've hurt me, I can't hurt you. Not even now that I know the truth." His face twists. "I am weak. So weak. My father was right."

He sits next to her on the floor and gives her a bitter smile. "Let me tell you something, Weasley. When I was sixteen years old, I was under orders as well. I was supposed to seduce you and 'divest you of your innocence'—my father's phrase, not mine, by the way. I was supposed to do the dirty deed at Malfoy Manor because of the greatest concentration of power existing in that place, and so on and so forth, etc., etc., I'm sure you can guess all the tiresome details. Oh, yes, and I wasn't supposed to shag anyone else but you after the pureblood initiation ceremony, because that was part of the entire plan to get the most power, as well."

Ginny sits up and licks her lips. They have suddenly gone very dry. "Why didn't you do it the first time I came to Malfoy Manor, then? It had already been almost a year after your initiation; you were just a few months away from your seventeenth birthday. It must've been _torture_ to go through all that time without having sex again. Oh—and then we didn't do anything and I left, so you had to wait _another_ year! I mean, it must have been just bloody _awful_ to have to wait and wait, once you knew what you were missing and we'd come so close the last time—"

"Yes, it was, and please don't remind me of it now," says Draco. "There's a bit more to it. If you didn't go along with the idea of having sex with me willingly the second time, I was supposed to take you by force."

"But you didn't."

"No, I didn't. I never would have done, either. Still, the point is that if I can hate you, then I suppose that you can hate me just as well. Come on, Weasley, get up." He reaches out his hand to her and pulls her to her feet, and his eyes close for a moment, as if in exquisite pain.

_He feels it as well,_ thinks Ginny. No matter what has just happened, no matter what they have confessed to one another, no matter what secrets have been revealed, and no matter how terrible this place is, something happens when they touch each other that makes everything else dissolve and disappear, and there is nothing left but him and her. She takes a deep breath.

"I still wish I'd stayed with you two years ago," she says.

Draco stops. "Really," he says cautiously. "Even knowing everything that you know now."

"Yes."

"And why is that?"

"Because I'm yours," she says. "No matter what you are, Draco, no matter what you've done—I'm going to start calling you by your first name again, by the way—I'm yours, and I've come back to you, and I'll never leave you again."

"I see," Draco says carefully. "All right. How about this, then? I wish I'd gone away with you two years ago, no matter what might have happened because of it. How does that sound?"

"Perfect," she says.

"Would you have gone anywhere in the world with me?" he asks. "Would you have left everything and everyone behind?"

"Yes, yes, _yes_," she says.

"I would have done as well," he says with a sigh. "Well, shite. That settles it."

"What on earth are you talking about?"

"It's very simple," he says, leaning forward, running his hand along the side of her face, her neck, her shoulder, skimming down to her waist, her hip. "I've gone mad after all, Ginny."

"_What?_ No. Draco, no, you've got the wrong idea completely—"

"Yes," he says. "This has been a hallucination from beginning to end. Gods, but the first bit was horrifying. I suppose it was because of this horrible place, but at least it's got better now, to say the least. At least I hope it has." He looks anxious. "Ginny, kiss me, quickly."

"Draco, listen to me," Ginny tries to say between kisses on his face, his neck, his throat, his arms, his hands, every bit of exposed skin she can reach, and even though he is too thin and his skin is painfully dry and hot, she never, never wants to stop, and it's hard to remember that she should also use actual words to _explain_ to him that this is really happening, especially because he starts kissing her back, fiercely and feverishly.

"I can't believe I fought madness so hard," he says. "I should've prayed for it instead. But I never knew it would _be_ like this, Ginny; I never knew it would mean you'd come to me this way, and say impossible things, and promise to stay with me—you'll be with me all the time, won't you? And it feels as if you're really kissing me! Will sex work out this well, do you think? Let's try it."

"_Draco!_ You're not mad! I'm really here," she insists.

"Well, of course that's what my hallucinatory version of you would say. Let's have sex right now, Ginny," Draco says eagerly. "I want to try that bit out. If I'm mad and this is all a hallucination, the guards won't notice a thing anyway. Unless… well, do you think they'll just see me wanking off or something? Not that it matters. Come on, Ginny!" He takes her by the hand and pulls her towards the little cot in the corner, and for a moment, she is truly tempted to let him do it.

But then they both hear the sound of boots clattering down the staircase.

"Psst! Psst! Over here!" Luna's silvery-blue eyes blink at them from the high little window. "I'm dreadfully sorry to interrupt such an about-to-be-intimate moment, but you've both just got to leave right away. Harry and Hermione are on their way down. They heard that you asked to see Draco, and I'm afraid that they figured out a few things from there… well, I'd leave rather quickly if I were you."

"Oh, no," moans Ginny.

"Wait a minute," says Draco. "That's Lovegood, and she can _see_ us. That means…" His eyes grow cold. "You're no hallucination, are you?"

"What else do you think I've been trying to tell you for the past half hour?" hisses Ginny.

"But, then… but, all of the things that you've said to me…"

"But then I meant that everything I said to you, Draco! Luna—how are we supposed to get out of here if the door is the only way out and they're coming down the stairs right now?"

"Oh, there's always another way out," says Luna. "Goodbye." The little window slides shut.

Ginny turns to Draco. "That water I hear dripping. Where's it coming from?"

"It's an underground river flowing beneath Stonehenge. That's where we are, in fact; but we're in a magical space, not the one Muggles see."

"But could we somehow—I don't know—come out there?" Ginny asks urgently.

"It would take more magic than I know, even if I had my wand," says Draco. "Listen to me. We don't have much time." He takes his hands in hers. "You're real, aren't you?"

"Yes, and if we don't get the hell out of here before the guards get in, we're going to find out just how real we both are!"

"We can't get out. There's no escape. Listen. The things I said to you, the things I've done, the things you've done to me—they don't really matter, do they? Nothing really matters, except—I couldn't say it before the Aurors came for me, but I wish I had, and I'll say it now." Draco bends his head. "I love you, I love you, Ginny. Always. No matter what you are, no matter what I am. I love you."

And in a flash, Ginny understands. She _knows_ where the magic could come from, enough magic to get them both out of the deepest cell of the dungeons of Malfoy Manor, a magic that has been built up between them through years of passion and sacrifice and betrayal and reunion.

"Ginny!" a voice bellows from just outside the door. _Harry's voice,_ she thought. She looks straight into Draco's beautiful gray eyes.

"I love you, Draco Malfoy," she says in a clear, strong voice, and the world dissolves around them.

Ginny opens her eyes. The sun shines down onto bright green grass around her, dotted with little white flowers. When she looks up, she sees craggy gray stone. A circle of stones, as if caught in a graceful dance of giants. _Stonehenge._ Draco's hand is clasped in hers. He sits up.

"Gods, I feel _human_ again. You can't know what it was like to be trapped in that cell. I really was going mad, Ginny. I... I'm sorry for the things I said to you when you first came in." He bites his lower lip. "You can't know how sorry I am."

"A Malfoy's apologized twice in thirty seconds," says Ginny. "Who would've thought?"

"Yes, well…" Draco looks away slightly. "Rather a lot of things have changed, haven't they?" The wind ruffles his silvery hair. "Anyway, we did it. We got out." He looks around him in wonder. "I never would have thought… but we actually managed it. Why is that Muggle in a blue coat coming towards us, by the way? He doesn't look happy in the least."

"I think we'd better get out of here," says Ginny in an undertone. "Tourists are definitely not supposed to be this close to the megaliths."

"Hmmph. _Tourists,_" says Draco, his face darkening, but he allows Ginny to lead him away into the green field. "What Muggles mistakenly refer to as Stonehenge has been part of Malfoy lands for over ten thousand years, you know."

"Yes. Uh… about that…" Ginny gulps. _Well, might as well begin the shocking revelations now. Of course, they've already more than begun, haven't they?_ "Draco, there's something you need to know. I, uh, made some financial arrangements in this past month, and you haven't lost any of your money after all."

Draco stares at her. "How'd you manage that? Everything was forfeit to the Ministry when I was thrown into prison."

"Well, Luna helped. She's very clever."

"_Lovegood?_" Draco's face darkens further. "I've already heard quite enough about her part in my getting locked in a keyless dungeon. Apparently, she's the one who hatched the plan to betray me, along with you—" He stopped. "Oh. Ah…"

She takes his hand. "Draco, you must have realized by now that I didn't betray you. But I had to pretend that I did, because otherwise, I never could've got in to see you at Malfoy Manor. But I _never_ would have really done it, not now." She hesitates. The warm spring wind blows around them, and the sun shines, and the dirty, ugly past seems as if it could be smoothed over so easily, along with the secrets that she had never thought would be dragged out into the light of day. But she can't allow this to happen; there can't be shadows between them. "You guessed right, about what happened before," she finally says. "You know that now."

"I told you what I did as well," says Draco. "Ginny, I had no choice. You've got to believe me. I couldn't go against what my father wanted, and I was a miserable snotty cold little bastard on top of that, infatuated with the Dark Arts, and half the time I believed what Voldemort said, but I never would have hurt you, Ginny, please, believe me—"

She puts a finger over his lips. "I do, Draco, I do. I just want you to know that I didn't have any choice, either. Dumbledore threatened me when I was barely fifteen years old; if I didn't do what he wanted—with you—I mean, then he was going to do something terrible to me."

"If he weren't already dead, I think I'd like to go back to Hogwarts and kill him," says Draco.

"Voldemort and Snape did the job pretty thoroughly between them," Ginny says dryly. "But I think from the very beginning, Draco, I… I loved you. Even when I was only fifteen years old and stupid and thought I loved Harry, I didn't. I've always loved you."

He takes her in his arms and gives her a look that makes her wish fiercely that he could pull her down into the tall grass and make love to her all afternoon long. But she hasn't told him what she started out wanting to tell him, and with a sigh, she pushes him away.

"Draco, there's something else, and you have to know what it is. It's not really about the money. Well, I suppose that it is in a way-"

"You said you'd saved it. Did you have to sign away your soul to Satan? If so, I'll get it back. He's a Malfoy ancestor, so there's no problem there," says Draco.

"No, that's not it," says Ginny. "Um… I saved the money and the property as well, but there's going to be a little problem with Malfoy Manor. I don't know if you can exactly go back to it." She waits anxiously for his response.

"I always hated that gloomy old pile," says Draco briskly. "I've got a lovely little villa in the South of France. We ought to go there and spend a few weeks. How does that sound?"

"Really nice, Draco, but… uh… there's a reason why you can't go back to Malfoy Manor."

"Because the Ministry is taking it over? Quite honestly, I don't think I care." Draco shrugs.

_Might as well get the explosion over with._ Ginny stops. "Draco, there's only one way to keep the Ministry from ever finding you and recapturing you again. If you don't do this, then there's always going to be a chance that they can throw you back into prison. Maybe even Azkaban, if they manage to round up some Dementors. I… I know that this is going to be…"

He scans her face. "Ginny, what is it?"

"You've got to give up magic. You've got to live as a Muggle, Draco. You've got to break your wand and never use it again."

He is silent for a long time. She watches him even _more_ anxiously.

"You're right. There's no other way. And I'll understand," he finally says.

"Understand what?"

"If you don't think that you can find it in you to be with me when I'm not a wizard."

All of her breath goes out in a rush. "Are you bloody serious?" she asks incredulously. "You'll never get rid of me, Draco Malfoy. I don't give a damn if you're a wizard or not."

He sighs in relief. "That's good. Because that bit about understanding was a load of shite. I'd hunt you down to the ends of the earth and get you back by sneaky underhanded tricks. If necessary, I'd beg and plead and be perfectly disgusting. I'd do things that no Malfoy's ever done, for you. I'd do anything that can be done to bring you back to me."

"I wouldn't leave you in the first place," Ginny says simply."But…" She hesitates. "Draco, won't it be… well… difficult? I suppose I don't just mean living without magic. I think what I mean is finding a life after the war's finally over. Who are we without all the fighting? Sometimes I feel like that's what I've spent my entire life doing, and I'm not sure how to do anything else."

He leans up against the back of a monolith. "I do feel as if I don't know who I am anymore, Ginny," he says quietly. "But I cannot be the man I was. No; not a man. A boy, a cruel and frightened boy… I was only sixteen when I was forced to take the Dark Mark, did you know that?" He looks past her, into the distance. "'The years that lie between… darkness, nothing but darkness…" He turns to her suddenly with a crooked smile. "Except for the parts that included you, of course. Could we learn to live in daylight together, do you think?"

"The sun's already risen, Draco," Ginny says softly.

"So it has," he says. He turns her to him and leans forwards and kisses her in the sunlight with the birds singing and the scent of flowers all around them, and Ginny thinks that no matter what lies ahead for both of them, rising through fathoms of darkness to find Draco Malfoy in her arms is very, very good indeed.

_the end_

**Author notes:** Here's the original prompt for the D/G exchange.

Briefly describe what you'd like to receive in your  
fic: I would like  
a fic set in a post war world, in which neither  
Volemort nor Harry  
have won but both have disappeared and no one knows  
what's become of  
them. The ministry is obsolete and there's some sort  
of civil war  
between death eaters and order's members for the  
control of what's  
left of their world. In this scenario Draco and Ginny  
have being force  
to be the leaders of each group, and fight each other  
not with magic  
or strength but with their heads. And against their  
hearts.  
The tone/mood of the fic: dark, kind of angsty  
An element/line of dialogue/object you would  
specifically like in your  
fic: "You can't win this game, silly girl. With  
your king missing, you  
have no reason to fight. Nothing to protect, no one to  
come back to…"  
Or some other allusion at chess and the fact that  
Ginny is missing the  
most important piece of the game.  
Preferred rating of the the fic you want: Definitely  
naughty or above.  
Canon or AU? AU but as canon as posible  
Deal Breakers (anything you don't want?): Ginny or  
Draco death, sexual  
violence, love at first sight


End file.
